Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh book review This time last year BBC 2 brought to the screen a "ghastly gaggle of braying Oxford toffs", as one reviewer put it, in a delightfully-cast three-part adaptation of Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh's 1928 satire on the great and the good of England, between the wars. [...]

10 Reasons NOT to Read Infinite Jest It’s never a good sign, it seems to me, when you’d rather unload the dishwasher than continue reading a particular book. Or make that dentist appointment you’ve been putting off. Or cut your toenails. Which, by the way, happens a lot in Infinite Jest, the 1996 novel [...]

Review of The Children's Book It has been said of A S Byatt that she does not wear her learning lightly. I'd go further: she has a tendency to club you over the head with it. The Children's Book (2009) is a bulging, behemoth of a book which frequently reads like an encyclopedia. There were [...]

The Gathering Book Review Good writers don't let you off easy. They provide no pat answers - there's no riding off together into the sunset as the orchestral music swells in the background. Good writers unsettle you. They leave you with questions. They disturb your assumptions, shake you out of your comfort zone. They [...]

A Bend in the River book review "The town in the interior, at the bend in the great river, had almost ceased to exist". The name of the town is never mentioned. We are told it is located in the heart of Africa, at the end of the navigable river, just below the cataracts. [...]

A Severed Head book review Martin Lynch-Gibbon is a lucky man. He has it all - a comfortable, tastefully decorated home; a gracious, loving wife whose beauty is only just beginning to fade, and a mistress practically young enough to be his daughter. There is no question of him leaving his wife, and his [...]

The Maltese Falcon book review In 1934, four years after The Maltese Falcon was published, Dashiell Hammett wrote this of his anti-heroic, hard-boiled detective, Sam Spade: "He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would liked to have been and quite a [...]

The 39 Steps book review “I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life." This, I think, is a perfect first line. Why is he - if it is a he - disgusted with life? What's happened up to now? And what is about to happen [...]

The Postman Always Rings Twice book review When I was in my teens I read a lot. This was partly because I had always read a lot, and partly because I had a lot of time on my hands, being neither athletically inclined nor socially in demand. For me, there were two kinds of [...]

The Bell Jar book review "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs . . ." So begins The Bell Jar, with an opening sentence that foreshadows events to come. Such a sentence promises the reader we are in for a remarkable story. If only the book lived up to [...]